Contributing Writer
Wake Forest School of Medicine
Vaidehi Mujumdar is a medical student at Wake Forest School of Medicine. An alumna of Dartmouth College, her writing has been published in The Guardian, The Almost Doctors Channel, The Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, India.com US Edition, Media Diversified, and others. Follow her on Twitter @VeeMuj.
The best mentor-mentee relationships I am a part of have allowed me to make mistakes while encouraging me and giving me targeted ways of doing better the next time around. They have also consisted of developing realistic goals and expectations. But, above all, they have taken what I bring to the table and helped elevate what is already there, not change it.
Previously, the only health care provider who possessed a doctorate degree was the physician. However, with the rise in educational standards across the United States, many health care professionals now must earn doctorates in their field before even beginning their careers.
Whenever my friends or family ask, “How’s medical school?” I have a simple, scripted response … But this response relays a fraction of what medical school has been like.
EMRs have been devastating — residents spend 60% of their time in front of the computer writing their note, where it used to be five minutes in shorthand. We have not made things more efficient. We’ve made things worse for physicians in practice.
When you pick a residency, the name is irrelevant, where you go is irrelevant, your score is irrelevant. If you don’t like the people, your life will be miserable.
When you leave medical school and go to your residency, what you realize is it’s a lot more than OnlineMedEd. No kidding — pelvic anatomy is a 20-minute video. Turns out there’s more to know than that. If you’re going to become a gynecologist who does surgery, you’re going to learn a hell of a lot more than I teach there.
As institutions of higher learning are becoming increasingly diverse, the portraiture that hangs in these institutions should reflect the bodies that inhabit their halls. Here, I argue that recency is particularly needed in academic medicine, and will propose some strategies for achieving it in our academic medical centers.
The in-Training Editors-in-Chief, Nihaal Mehta and Amelia Mackarey, talked to Dr. Dustyn Williams and Jamie Fitch, co-founders of OnlineMedEd, one of the most widely-used educational resources by medical students around the world.
The in-Training Editors-in-Chief, Nihaal Mehta and Amelia Mackarey, talked to Dr. Dustyn Williams and Jamie Fitch, co-founders of OnlineMedEd, one of the most widely-used educational resources by medical students around the world.
Nationally, our current medical education model fails to address the fundamental tenets of the U.S. health care system, health care policy, and business management. Despite the recent major shift in health care policy, medical schools have proved universally inept at equipping future doctors with the knowledge and tools they need to influence policy in their professional field and to thrive in their careers.
They say to become truly educated is to begin to realize how little you really know. I used to not understand this — it seemed the more I learned, the more I knew. How could it be different? This changed in medical school. It was only then that I began to feel more and more ignorant with each passing day of my education.
Walking into the conference room for grand rounds, I took a deep breath. I was terrified. My biggest fear was that I would hate it — hate the time spent in neurosurgery, hate the American health care system and even just hate surgery over medicine.
Columnist
Royal College of Surgeons Ireland
Full time medical student. Future surgeon. Part time nurse. Lifelong bibliophile. I stop on the street to talk to dogs.
Cutting It
A medical degree offers students a global skill, where they can work anywhere in the world. But in reality, how easy it is to leave one health service for another? Join Suzanne as she navigates studying in Ireland while planning for a surgical residency abroad.
